In his acclaimed work Danube, Claudio Magris painted a vast canvas stretching from the source of the river to the Black Sea. Now he focuses on the tiny borderlands of Istria and Italy where he was born and where he has lived most intensely. From the forests of Monte Nevoso, to the hidden valleys of the Tyrol, to a Trieste café, Microcosms pieces together a mosaic of stories - comic, tragic, picaresque, nostalgic - from life's minor characters. Their worlds might be small, but they are far from minimalist: in them flashes the great, the meaningful, the unrepeatable significance of every existence. Microcosms won the Strega Prize in 1997.
Author
Claudio Magris was born in Trieste in the year 1939. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978. His most well knwon book is Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history. He's translated the works of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler, among others, and he published also essays about Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse and many others.
